Harvesting the Heart Read online

  My mother did not turn around, but her hand stopped stirring the sauce for the span of a breath. "Our lives weren't a little bit different, though, were they?" she said.

  I stared at her back until I could not stand it anymore. Then I threw the carrots, the tomatoes, and the cucumber into the bowl, while the rough anger and the disappointment pressed back-to-back and settled heavy on my chest.

  We ate on the porch, and afterward we watched the sun go down. We drank cold peach wine coolers from cognac glasses that still had price stickers on their bottoms. My mother pointed out the mountains in the background, which rose in swells so close they seemed within reach. I concentrated on physical things: the bones of our knees, the curve of our calves, the placement of freckles, all so similar. "When I first moved here," my mother said, "I used to wonder if it was at all like Ireland. Your father was always saying he'd take me there, but it never happened." She paused. "I miss him very much, you know."

  I stared at her, softening. "He told me you were married three months after you'd met." I took a large gulp of wine and smiled tentatively. "It was love at first sight, he said."

  My mother leaned back her head so that her throat was straight and white and vulnerable. "It could have been," she said. "I can't remember all that well. I know I couldn't wait to get out of Wisconsin, and then Patrick magically appeared, and I always felt a little sorry that he had to suffer when I found out it hadn't been about Wisconsin at all."

  I saw this as my lead-in. "When I was little," I said, "I used to dream up these scenarios that had made you leave. I figured once that you were connected to a gang and you'd slipped up and they threatened the safety of your family. And another time I figured that you maybe had fallen in love with someone else and run off with him."

  "There was someone else," my mother said frankly, "but it was after I left, and I never loved him. I wasn't going to take that away from Patrick too."

  I put the glass down beside me, tracing its edge with my fingertip. "What made you leave, then?" I asked.

  My mother stood up and rubbed her upper arms. "Damn mosquitoes," she said. "I swear they're here all year. I'm going to check on the barn." She started to turn away. "You can stay or you can come."

  I stared at her, astonished. "How can you do that?" "Do what?"

  "Just change the subject like that?" I hadn't come all this distance just to be pushed farther away. I walked down the two steps of the porch until we were standing eye-to-eye. "It's been twenty years, Mom," I said. "Isn't it a little late to be dodging the question?"

  "It's been twenty years, dear," my mother shot back. "What makes you think I remember the answer?" She broke her stare, looking down at her shoes, and then she sighed. "It was not the mob, and it was not a lover. It wasn't anything like that at all. It was something much more normal."

  I lifted my chin. "You still haven't given me a reason," I said, "and you are far from what is considered normal. Normal people do not vanish in the middle of the night and never speak to their families again. Normal people do not spend two decades using a dead person's name. Normal people do not meet their daughter for the first time in twenty years and act like it's an ordinary visit."

  My mother took a step back, anger and pride making violet slashes in her eyes. "If I had known you were coming," she said, "I would have taken my goddamned red carpet out of storage." She started off toward the barn, and then she stopped and faced me. When she spoke, her voice was more gentle, as if she'd realized too late what she had said. "Don't ask me why I left, Paige, until you can tell yourself why you left."

  Her words burned, flaming my cheeks and my throat. I watched her slip up the hill toward the barn.

  I wanted to run after her and tell her it was her fault that I'd left; that I knew I had to take this opportunity to learn all the things I had never learned from her: how to look pretty; how to hold a man; how to be a mother. I wanted to tell her that I never would have left my husband and my child under any other circumstances and that, unlike her, I was going back. But I had a feeling that she would have laughed at me and said, Yes, that's the way it begins. And I had a feeling that I would not be telling the complete truth.

  I had left before I had any inkling that I wanted to find my mother. I had left without giving my mother a second thought. No matter what I had brainwashed myself to believe by now, I hadn't even considered going to Chicago until I was several hundred miles away from my home. I needed to see her; I wanted to see her--I understood what had prompted me to hire Eddie Savoy. But it was only after I'd left Max and Nicholas that I thought of coming here. It wasn't the other way around. The truth was that even if my mother had lived just down the street, I would have wanted to get away.

  Back then I had blamed it on Max's nosebleed--but that had just been the spark that set off the fire. The real reason was that my confusion ran too deep to sort out at home. I had to go. I didn't have any other choice. I didn't leave out of anger, and I didn't want to leave forever--just long enough. Long enough to feel that I wasn't doing it all wrong. Long enough to feel that I mattered, that I was more than a necessary extension of Max's or Nicholas's life.

  I thought of all the magazine articles I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, See how lucky you are? But it had been gnawing at me inside, that part that didn't quite fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?

  I saw a light flash on in the barn, and all of a sudden I knew why my mother had left.

  I went up to the bathroom and undressed. I ran hot water in the claw-footed tub and thought about how good it would feel on the clenched muscles of my thighs. Riding had made me aware of places on my body that I hadn't known existed. I brushed my teeth and stepped neatly into the tub. I leaned my head back against the enamel rim, closed my eyes, and tried to will away thoughts of my mother.

  Instead I pictured Max, who would be exactly three and a half months old the next day. I tried to remember the milestones he should have been reaching now, according to that First Year book Nicholas had brought me. Solid foods, that was the only one I could remember, and I wondered what he thought of bananas, applesauce, strained peas. I tried to imagine his tongue pushing out against a spoon, that unfamiliar object. I smoothed one hand over the other and tried to remember his silky powdered touch.

  When I opened my eyes, my mother was standing over the bathtub, wearing a yellow wrapper. I tried to cross my arms over my chest and to twist my legs, but it was too small a tub. A flush of embarrassment ran from my belly up to my cheeks. "Don't," she said. "You've turned out quite beautiful."

  I stood up abruptly, grabbing a towel and sloshing water all over the floor in my hurry. "I don't think so," I murmured, and I threw open the bathroom door. I ran to my little-girl room, letting the steam steal down the hall to veil my image from my mother.

  When I first woke up, before I was fully conscious, I thought that they were at it again. I could so clearly hear in my imagination the voices of my mother and father attacking, tangling, retreating.

  They were not fights; they were never really fights. They were triggered by the simplest things: a burned souffle, a priest's sermon, a supper my father came home to late. They were only half-arguments, started by my mother and quelled by my father. He never picked up the gauntlet. He'd let her scream and accuse, and then, when the sobs came, his soft words would cover her like a soft blanket.

  It didn't scare me. I used to lie in bed and listen to the scene that had been replayed so many times I knew the dialogue by heart. Slam: that was my mother at the bedroom door, and seconds later it would open again, once my father came upstairs. In the months after my mother left, when I was doing my remembering, I thought of the arguments and I added the pictures I could never see, fashioning them like actors in a grainy black-